Recently we had Agile fest in our company and we got some good speakers to deliver talks on Agile and related methodologies; The event was quite a hit and people appreciated it. I participated in the event as a volunteer and facilitator of few workshops. One of the common question- I heard from the participants was that how can they do pair programming when many members of their team are sitting at some distant location office (US) and they have very less time to share with other due to time-zone issues.

I had an interesting conversation with one of the participants with same dilemma, putting it here.

M: Thats great you want to do pair programming so what is the requirement..why you want to do.P: umm.. We are using agile in our project so I want to do pair programming with my counterparts in US; this will improve the quality…

I was watching a beautiful and sensitive movie this afternoon; directed by “Onir”- My Brother Nikhil was released in 2005. MBN is story of a young energetic boy-Nikhil and his struggle for life after he diagnosed as a HIV positive. The time period of the story is shown as 1986-1992; when awareness of HIV/Aids was considerably low in most part of India; even people were not suppose to talk about it in open. When I am seeing this movie in 2014; many scenes of the film doesn’t go with the current social milieu. Thanks to all the awareness spread by some meaningful NGO’s, Internet and Media and to some extent by our Government.

Movie is in the form of narration where Anamika, elder sister of Nikhil is narrating her brother’s story to the viewers along with people associated with Nikhil’s life. Movie goes in flashback when Nikhil was a young boy and getting trained by his father for the state swimming championship; the role of his father is portrayed by Victor Banerjee and he has done full justice to the role of a typical Indian patriarch father who wants to live his dreams through his son. Movie gradually moves forward as Nikhil becomes the state swimming champion; his parents were looking for a suitable bride for him but suddenly story takes an unexpected turn when Nikhil get informed by his sports club doctor that his HIV report is positive. His life was changed and now starts the real movie showcasing the turbulence and uphill struggle in Nikhil’s life- how he deals with the suffering, trauma and loneliness of being a HIV positive patient in early nineties of India. How his sister- Anamika, played by Juhi Chawala struggles for him in rest of his journey braving social stigma, societal and family hate towards the victim more than the disease. Especially that was the time, when being a HIV positive patient means a big social crime and a permanent stamp of certified pervert. Juhi essayed the role of Anamika quite beautifully and convincingly; as a loving sister and strong lady fighting a battle for her younger brother- she is an absolute delight to watch.

Another important character is Nigel, (boy) friend of Nikhil; who stands with him throughout the story. Purab Kohli had played the role of Nigel with great maturity; the conversations between Nikhil and Nigel are short but strong enough to reflect the bond between them. The music of this Movie was great and captivating; songs were sung by Shaan, KK and Lucky Ali; all are genuine and gifted singers.

And lastly I would like to mention the two heroes of the film- Sanjay as Nikhil is great to watch because of his acting abilities; he was successful in showing the anger, frustration and disappointment of a HIV positive patient. Onir is another hero, who is behind the curtain but life of the film as we can feel the brilliance of the director in each scene, conversation and editing task.

The director has included an angle of homosexuality in this movie quite aesthetically and he has conveyed fruitfully the humane aspect of this truth of our society- our people. When their existence is unreasonably denied in our social structure- these films are the medium to pass the message that companionship is a very beautiful and strong creation of Almighty and it is free from any gender, age and social bondages. A nice movie to watch.

“If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.” — Simon Sinek

Today morning, I check this quote as a linkedin post by a friend and it has forced me to express my outlook on the same.

Mr. Simon is an impressive author on human motivation but still I personally don’t see this quote as reasonably appealing.

Firstly hiring people “who believe what you believe” is a quite difficult task and it’s not possible to follow this mantra at all level in an organization especially in mid size and big companies. I don’t mean that author is saying to blindly follow it at every level of the company but even in bootstrapping start-ups; many times it’s difficult to get an apposite person who believe in your philosophy of product/business and if you are able to get, then it means a lot for that start-up. This philosophy is good but it can only practically work in the case of co-founders, early employees or senior members of the company, at all other levels this approach is impractical / unconvincing.

The phrase “work for your money” in this quote is a bit disappointing; if anybody is working for a concern; he is working for money or working for his/her share of money, the use of word ‘your’ gives you the sense of capitalism and one sidedness.

Again, If you are working for money in spite of you are working seriously and giving efforts, the money you deserve is not yours– a pathetic poor joke; but on the other hand company expect your blood and sweat and tears; Sorry but this is a not creating a sketch of a 21st century professional company rather a colonial era mill.

Why working for money or talking about money related to work is such a taboo topic; I really don’t understand- agreed money is not the most important motivation factor but it is one of the imperative one and if anybody is denying the fact he must be joking.

If you are doing general hiring – have the clear understanding- what you want for the related position but also keep yourself open- as sometimes you get to meet some really deserving candidate not apposite for particular business/technology role but you can fix them somewhere else.

Look for concrete basic concepts, capability of grasping new things, openness towards new ideas, inquisitiveness and enthusiasm rest all, I believe is bookish and redundant.

Recently, I have got a fruitful chance to work on an integration task of a multi module Gradle project with Sonar. This was the first time; I worked on Gradle and find it really cool with multi project build support, powerful dependency management system, and already enriched domain model. Before this, I generally worked on ant, maven build systems but I have find gradle a bit easy as you can easily build logic inside the Gradle task by doing simple coding- yes you read it right; no godzilla sized xmls, shell scripts….just groovy code that runs on JVM.

But again, the efficacy of Gradle compare to other available build tool options is not our intent to discuss here.

So let’s see in few simple steps-how to integrate Sonar with gradle based projects.

Before start, we need to confirm if the current gradle version (and related sonar plugin) installed in our system supports multi project build and project setting configuration, if not, it’s time to migrate to the latest version.

Now go to your parent build.gradle file and put below lines, the second line will apply the Sonar plugin and include all related tasks into your build system.

Third line is here to apply cobertura.gradle file, to generate code coverage. remember the parent build.gradle and cobertua.gradle should be placed at the same level.

Now let’s define the sonar specific configuration for each sub-project, add sonar URL and project related configuration detail under “project” as shown below. Unless Sonar is run locally and with default settings, it is also necessary to configure connection settings for the Sonar server and database.

We can see here- under project element, we are declaring cobertura report path in xml format, and this will be utilise by sonar to show code coverage.

So now we are pretty much done with the sonar integration with our multi project build system; but hey we have not created the code coverage files yet, just given the coverage file path. Here comes the choices, you can use some available open source plug-ins for coverage report generation or you can do generate with your own code as we are going to do in next few lines.

The groovy code(cobertura.gradle) given below is to instrument classes and create coverage reports. Reports in html and xml will be created at “build/reports”.

So finally we are done with the set-up, just run cobertura and sonar task defined in the files, once the coverage reports and sonar tasks are done, launch the URL given above and you are ready to analyse your project statistics :).

Feedback and Suggestions are welcome and please contact me if you have any difficulties or leave a comment below to help out other users.

Done with the first hurdle, don’t know exactly how much I have performed, neither good nor bad…somewhere in between..I would say. The feeling I have, somewhere in my heart and mind is a positive one….I know , have done enough to clear the first hurdle….lets prepare for the next one…

Hope is a good thing may be the best of things and no good thing ever dies.

﻿﻿I went to my hometown for some important work; there I got a chance to watch this marvellous celluloid work by Frank Darabont- The Shawshank Redemption. I should admit that I am absolutely spellbound by the great script, impeccable performance of actors and apposite art direction of this movie. Above line in bold is one of the many unforgettable dialogs of this movie.

The film moves around an investment banker Andrew, acted by Tim Robbins, who is convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences at Shawshank State Penitentiary. As movie moves forward, Andrew gets friendly with Ellis Boyd played by Morgan Freeman, who is known for providing contrabands to jail inmates. In one of the scene, where jail inmates were performing the roof tarring task, Andrew uses his finance and legal acumen and helps the captain of the jail guards on his tax planning, and that becomes turning point of the movie; as later Andrew becomes the caretaker of prisoner’s library and also serves as a financial advisor to jail guards and most importantly to jail Warden Samuel Norton for running his money laundering scams. All these small scenes of the movie are well intentioned as these sequences provide a meaningful base to the script especially the climax when Andrew successfully manages to escape from the jail.

The director has sketched quite fruitfully the milieu of mid 20th century American jail, especially the intrinsic minutiae like the characters lingo, trading inside the prison in the form of cigarettes, corruption inside the jail and presence of red tapism in outside world. The character of Andrew’s inmate Elis Boyd (Red) is quite strong and portrays the ups and downs, the mental state of a prisoner who spent most of his life inside the prison. His body language is terrific and reflects the inexplicable anguish beats of his existence. The character of an elderly inmate Brooks Hatlen should be mentioned as it was small yet an important role and reveals the unsaid ghastly truth of prisoners’ rehabilitation.

The background score of the movie is impressive and composed by Thomas Newman; the score was also nominated for Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1994. Overall the movie is great and emphasized on the philosophy of hope and optimism. If you haven’t seen it yet, then got for it; a must watch.

So finally an entry after a considerable hiatus, Though not a regular entry related to general topics on which I normally scribble to satisfy my urge of gratuitous or obligatory inscription and sharing things with you guys.

Today morning, I noticed that my blog crossed the mark of 10000, current state is 10001, and I should accept honestly that I like the figure. Is it sounding juvenile, but for a moment I felt the same what I in-script.